I have been slowly reading through Katrina by Gary Rivlin. The book, written 10 years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, analyzes the storm’s aftermath and the process of rebuilding. The politics here are riveting, and it is both heartening and disheartening to see how a city can come together around tragedy — as well as still bitterly fight the “old fights.”

So far though, the bigger lesson to me is how much the media got wrong in the days immediately after the storm — and this is crucial — how much of that coverage later drove decision-making about what to do in the city long-term.

This in some ways is not a revelation — it is hardly surprising that some facts are wrong given how rapid the

It’s another year, and another year of great books. One of the goals of this year was to write more reviews of books that I have read — as you can see from the archives, that failed miserably except for a capsule blog post about Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem. I am making no promises about this next year.

That said, there were a number of great books that I read this year, and I hope more people read them as well. As I wrote about last week, I am attempting to be more deliberate with what I am reading. So there is more fiction this year, and I hope that trend continues next year.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I have two problems: one is that I read a lot of books. The other is that I buy a lot of books. Unfortunately, my credit card is more plentiful than my time these days, which means that I have an increasingly large number of books that I haven’t read yet. I even bought a separate bookcase in order to hold all of these volumes. I currently have approximately 300 books in my apartment, and about 20% of those are unread.

I read a post (which I have since lost) which said that the basic rule of books is that if you bought a book and haven’t read it within a decade, you probably should just find a way to give it away.

This is an apt description of the problem of modern “content.” Journalists are now lined up next to native advertising partners. Ads often take on more signals of authority than researched pieces. We once were able to distinguish between all of this, but as we have blurred the lines, we have empowered those who want to bamboozle us (Russia?) while disempowering our most thoughtful writers and researchers.

I was having two separate conversations with my friends this week, and both were complaining about recent challenges around promotions, In both cases, their managers had assured them that a promotion was in the offing, and that it was merely “paperwork” that remained before it would be processed. In both cases, promotions were delayed for these employees, engendering cynicism in an otherwise productive relationship.

Another friend of mine recently discovered that he was being paid significantly lower than other people at the same firm with the same experience and job title. Not a small pay difference, but something on the order of 40-50% of salary. When he checked around with colleagues, it seemed that others had worked harder to negotiate better bonus structures over the

Recently Read

Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick's Building Successful Online Communities

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Nir Eyal's Hooked

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Malka Older's Null State

Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies

Philipp Meuser's Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang

Nicholas Bonner's Made in North Korea

Current Obsessions

Political Risk: The risk from elections, changes in government, war, etc. have seemed to increase signifniacntly in the last few years, and yet our tools to understand how political risk affects companies and individuals have remained stagnant. How can we revolutionize the field?

Competitive Cities: After Amazon's bid for its HQ2 got hundreds of proposals from cities across the United States, how might cities more efficiently use economic development dollars to create job growth? How can we analyze what works and what doesn't?

Cost Disease: Costs for many services in the US have skyrocketed, including industries as diverse as housing, health, education, and infrastructure. What is driving these prices, and what can be done to bring prices more in line with inflation in other industries?

New Approaches to Political Lobbying: Lobbying remains completely ancient compared to the technological change that has happened to nearly every other form of brokering industry. What can be done to improve its effectiveness, with the hope of improving access for all people to politicians.

Next-generation Media: Media businesses are still struggling, yet it is clear that a persistent focus on audience development and subscriptions is the way forward. What tools need to be built to bring this world to fruition faster?

Graph Databases and Learning: This is more broad-based – how can we use knowledge maps to improve learning (specifically thinking around foreign languages).